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Nutrients Feb 2022A number of factors contribute to the complex process of aging, which finally define whether someone will or not develop age-associated chronic diseases in late life.... (Review)
Review
A number of factors contribute to the complex process of aging, which finally define whether someone will or not develop age-associated chronic diseases in late life. These determinants comprise genetic susceptibility as well as various behavioral, environmental, and dietary factors, all of which have been shown to influence specific pathways regulating the aging process and the extension of life, which makes longevity a multidimensional phenomenon. Although a "miraculous elixir" or a "nutrition pill" are not plausible, researchers agree on the notion that nutritional factors have major impact on the risk of age-associated chronic non-communicable diseases and mortality. In recent years nutrition research in relation to health outcomes has considerably changed from focusing exclusively on single nutrients to considering combinations of foods rather than nutrients in isolation. Although research on specific nutrients is scientifically valid providing crucial evidence on the mechanisms by which nutrition impacts health, the recent switch targeting the multifaceted synergistic interplay among nutrients, other dietary constituents, and whole foods, has promoted emerging interest on the actions of total dietary patterns. This narrative review aims to describe some specific dietary patterns with evidence of associations with reduction in the incidence of chronic diseases allowing older adults to live a long-lasting and healthier life, and confirming the powerful impact nutrition can exert on healthy aging.
Topics: Diet; Feeding Behavior; Healthy Aging; Longevity; Nutritional Status
PubMed: 35215539
DOI: 10.3390/nu14040889 -
JACC. Cardiovascular Interventions Jun 2021A significant proportion of lesions treated with transcatheter interventions in the coronary and peripheral vascular beds exhibit moderate to severe calcific plaques... (Review)
Review
A significant proportion of lesions treated with transcatheter interventions in the coronary and peripheral vascular beds exhibit moderate to severe calcific plaques known to portend lower procedural success rates, increased peri-procedural adverse events, and unfavorable clinical outcomes compared with noncalcific plaques. Adapted from lithotripsy technology used for treatment of ureterorenal calculi, intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) is a novel technique for the treatment of severely calcific plaque lesions that uses acoustic shockwaves in a balloon-based delivery system. Shockwaves induce calcium fractures, which facilitate stent expansion and luminal gain. In this review, the authors summarize the physics, preclinical and clinical data on IVL use in the coronary and peripheral vasculature, and future directions of IVL in transcatheter cardiovascular therapies.
Topics: Coronary Artery Disease; Humans; Lithotripsy; Stents; Treatment Outcome; Vascular Calcification
PubMed: 34167671
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcin.2021.03.036 -
Frontiers in Pharmacology 2018Elixirs conferring eternal youth or inducing amatory and erotic attraction have been searched for without success. Lovesickness is a widespread affliction resulting... (Review)
Review
Elixirs conferring eternal youth or inducing amatory and erotic attraction have been searched for without success. Lovesickness is a widespread affliction resulting from unrequited love and/or the impossibility for physical and emotional union. The symptoms are reflections of altered dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, testosterone and cortisol levels and range from frenzy and intrusive thinking to despair and depression, sharing traits with the neurochemistry of addiction and compulsive behavior disorder. Although it can seriously impact the quality of life, lovesickness is currently not considered in official disease classification systems. Consequently, no official therapeutic guidelines exist, leaving subjects to seek the cure on their own. We review literature of the past 2000 years dealing with the concept, diagnosis and the healing of lovesickness and contextualize it with neurochemical, ethnomedical, and ethnographic data. Since neurobiological and pharmacological connections between the love drive and the sex drive exist, we review also the literature about herbal an- and aphrodisiacs, focusing on their excitatory or calmative potential. An overall consensus regarding socio-behavioral regimes exists for dealing with lovesickness from historical through contemporary literature. The herbal drugs used for treating lovesickness or inducing love passion do not possess the alleged properties. The pharmacological effects of aphrodisiacs are heterogeneous, including dopaminergic and adrenergic activities, but there is no evidence for any serotonergic effects. The libido-regulating properties of anaphrodisiacs seem to be associated with sedative and toxic effects or decreasing testosterone levels. CB receptors expressed on dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area, part of the brain's reward circuit, implicated with addiction, orgasm and strong emotions such as love, might constitute a new therapeutic target. The common food additive and CB agonist β-caryophyllene might have the potential to attenuate dopaminergic firing, quenching the reward and thus motivation associated with romantic love. From Greek mythology to modern history, cultural expressions and implications of love, sex and procreation is and was organized along hierarchical lines that put men on top. The neuronal predispositions and activities associated with falling in love will probably forever remain nature's and Eros' secret.
PubMed: 30026695
DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2018.00567 -
F1000Research 2021Toxicology has been an active research field for many decades, with academic, industrial and government involvement. Modern omics and computational approaches are...
Toxicology has been an active research field for many decades, with academic, industrial and government involvement. Modern omics and computational approaches are changing the field, from merely disease-specific observational models into target-specific predictive models. Traditionally, toxicology has strong links with other fields such as biology, chemistry, pharmacology and medicine. With the rise of synthetic and new engineered materials, alongside ongoing prioritisation needs in chemical risk assessment for existing chemicals, early predictive evaluations are becoming of utmost importance to both scientific and regulatory purposes. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe. To coordinate the linkage of various life science efforts around modern predictive toxicology, the establishment of a new ELIXIR Community is seen as instrumental. In the past few years, joint efforts, building on incidental overlap, have been piloted in the context of ELIXIR. For example, the EU-ToxRisk, diXa, HeCaToS, transQST, and the nanotoxicology community have worked with the ELIXIR TeSS, Bioschemas, and Compute Platforms and activities. In 2018, a core group of interested parties wrote a proposal, outlining a sketch of what this new ELIXIR Toxicology Community would look like. A recent workshop (held September 30th to October 1st, 2020) extended this into an ELIXIR Toxicology roadmap and a shortlist of limited investment-high gain collaborations to give body to this new community. This Whitepaper outlines the results of these efforts and defines our vision of the ELIXIR Toxicology Community and how it complements other ELIXIR activities.
Topics: Biological Science Disciplines; Europe; Risk Assessment
PubMed: 37842337
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.74502.2 -
Journal of Pharmacy & Bioallied Sciences Aug 2020Chlorhexidine is a cationic bisbiguanide with broad antibacterial activity, and wide spectrum of activity encompassing gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, yeasts,... (Review)
Review
Chlorhexidine is a cationic bisbiguanide with broad antibacterial activity, and wide spectrum of activity encompassing gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, yeasts, dermatophytes and some lipophilic viruses. Its antibacterial action is due to the disruption of the bacterial cell membrane by the chlorhexidine molecules, increasing the permeability and resulting in cell lysis. Thus, chlorhexidine plays a key role in the dentistry and is used to treat or prevent periodontal disease, and has earned its eponym of the gold standard. This article reviews in detail about the mechanism of action, indications, forms and various studies related to chlorhexidine.
PubMed: 33149431
DOI: 10.4103/jpbs.JPBS_162_20 -
F1000Research 2018We describe the design, implementation, and use of the META-pipe Authorization service. META-pipe is a complete workflow for the analysis of marine metagenomics data. We...
We describe the design, implementation, and use of the META-pipe Authorization service. META-pipe is a complete workflow for the analysis of marine metagenomics data. We will provide META-pipe as a web based data analysis service for ELIXIR users. We have integrated our Authorization service with the ELIXIR Authorization and Authentication Infrastructure (AAI) that allows single sign-on to services across the ELIXIR infrastructure. We use the Authorization service to authorize access to data on the META-pipe storage system and jobs in the META-pipe job queue. Our Authorization server was among the first SAML2 service providers that integrated with ELIXIR AAI. The code is open source at: https://gitlab.com/uit-sfb/AuthService2.
PubMed: 29946431
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.13256.2 -
ELife Nov 2023Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancer types with poor treatment options. Better detection of early symptoms and relevant disease correlations could improve...
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancer types with poor treatment options. Better detection of early symptoms and relevant disease correlations could improve pancreatic cancer prognosis. In this retrospective study, we used symptom and disease codes (ICD-10) from the Danish National Patient Registry (NPR) encompassing 6.9 million patients from 1994 to 2018,, of whom 23,592 were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The Danish cancer registry included 18,523 of these patients. To complement and compare the registry diagnosis codes with deeper clinical data, we used a text mining approach to extract symptoms from free text clinical notes in electronic health records (3078 pancreatic cancer patients and 30,780 controls). We used both data sources to generate and compare symptom disease trajectories to uncover temporal patterns of symptoms prior to pancreatic cancer diagnosis for the same patients. We show that the text mining of the clinical notes was able to complement the registry-based symptoms by capturing more symptoms prior to pancreatic cancer diagnosis. For example, 'Blood pressure reading without diagnosis', 'Abnormalities of heartbeat', and 'Intestinal obstruction' were not found for the registry-based analysis. Chaining symptoms together in trajectories identified two groups of patients with lower median survival (<90 days) following the trajectories 'Cough→Jaundice→Intestinal obstruction' and 'Pain→Jaundice→Abnormal results of function studies'. These results provide a comprehensive comparison of the two types of pancreatic cancer symptom trajectories, which in combination can leverage the full potential of the health data and ultimately provide a fuller picture for detection of early risk factors for pancreatic cancer.
Topics: Humans; Electronic Health Records; Retrospective Studies; Routinely Collected Health Data; Pancreatic Neoplasms; Jaundice; Denmark
PubMed: 37988407
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.84919